As encoders have become more and more sophisticated and high precision, their setup and alignment has become more and more critical. Some encoders are completely sealed units and are thusly aligned and calibrated at the factory under ideal conditions. On the other hand, many other encoders, such as those sold by the assignee of the present invention, are delivered to customers as components or subsystems. There are several benefits of to this approach, however it does preclude full factory setup/alignment. Therefore, various means have been developed to aid customers during the installation and setup of this class of encoder.
Typical early attempts at helping customers set up these encoders comprised not much more than providing a set of test points in the electronics and a systematic written procedure to follow. More recently, various sensing circuits have been included in the encoder electronics that provide some indication of proper alignment and/or inform the user about calibration adjustments.
The prior art alignment aids do not provide any automatic calibration features. At best they seem to give a general indication of signal strength (i.e., is the electrical sinusoid too weak or too strong). For optimal operation, the relative phase between the quadrature signals should be as close to 90 degrees as possible, their relative gains should be equalized, and their individual offsets should be set to zero. To the extent possible, these calibration operations should be transparent to the user (that is, not require the user to make fine electrical adjustments).
In addition to these calibrations, modern encoders also have index (or reference) marks. The output index pulses should occur every time the scale is in the same position relative to the encoder head. Thus another problem addressed by this invention is the need to calibrate the index pulse generation system such that the index pulse is generated at the same scale location to within an LSB of the encoder measurement.